“Holiday’s Catholic training really went to her artistry, to her sound, to her sense of self,” said Tracy Fessenden, Ph.D., author of Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State University Press, 2018) and a religious studies professor at Arizona State University. “For all of the ink that has been spilled about Holiday and all of the movies that we have yet to see, we just don’t see much attention paid to her Catholicism.” 

In a lecture at the Rose Hill campus on March 29, Fessenden discussed how the singer’s Catholic childhood impacted her life and music. Fessenden’s speech was paired with performances from students in the Fordham Jazz Quintet, who sang and played songs by Holiday. Their dual presentation was co-sponsored by the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and the Department of Music. 

Fessenden said that Holiday grew up in Baltimore, a port city with a strong Catholic presence dating back to the 18th century. She received her only formal vocal instruction at the Baltimore House of the Good Shepherd for Colored Girls, the Catholic convent where she was sent to live as a child. 

Holiday attended Mass and sang to liturgical music every day. There are hints of her Catholic upbringing in her songs, particularly in her diction, idiosyncratic stresses, and phrasing, said Fessenden She noted that Holiday’s song “God Bless The Child,” is a swing spiritual with Catholic roots that has been performed by gospel choirs across the world. Holiday also received the sacraments, prayed the rosary, and maintained a lifelong friendship with well-known priest and jazz musician Norman O’Connor, she said. 

During her presentation, Fessenden paused periodically for student performances of six Billie Holiday songs: “I Cover the Waterfront,” “Lady Sings The Blues,” “God Bless The Child,” “My Man,” “Strange Fruit,” and “Fine and Mellow.” 

Music has the power to bring people together, especially during the pandemic and the ongoing war in Ukraine, said Fessenden. 

“It serves as a testament to life’s ongoingness, even in ravaged places,” she said. “That use of music is very much in the spirit of Holiday.” 

Many students at Hayes—as the school is known—are potentially the first in their families to attend college. Most are Hispanic and African-American, and many come from single-parent homes in the South Bronx whose families struggle financially, said the school’s principal, William Lessa. 

Four years ago, Fordham developed a partnership with Hayes that began with a mentoring program and has expanded to include work with WFUV, the Gabelli School of Business, the Graduate School of Education, and Fordham-based Jesuits. The collaboration has evolved into a symbiotic relationship between two schools that share similar missions and values, said staff from both institutions. 

“Our partnership with Cardinal Hayes is a critical one,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “Students cannot aspire to a life they do not know exists, and they cannot achieve that life unless they are taught that it belongs within their grasp. If that were the only reason for the partnership, it would be enough. But engagement with the Hayes students, their families, and their community also enriches Fordham. We are wiser, better grounded in the lives of our neighbors, and the beneficiary of great talents that would otherwise go untapped, were it not for this partnership.”

The ties between the two schools have given Fordham students a window into what life in the South Bronx looks like, said Roxanne De La Torre, FCRH ’09, GRE ’11, director of campus and community leadership for Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning. 

“For our students to get more exposure to the Bronx—the South Bronx, in particular—for our students to get out of our campus and meet people who live and work and go to school here in the Bronx, is a huge positive,” said De La Torre, who helped drive the partnership between the two schools. 

And for many young men at Hayes, exposure to Fordham’s staff and students has broadened their horizons and opened doors. 

“Our kids are fascinated by them … They have no idea who lives out there,” said Lessa, adding that the partnership is also important to his students’ families. “I think our parents have decided to invest a considerable amount of money into their sons’ education in the hopes that they’ll be the first person in their homes to go onto college. Education is transformational and can be a change agent in their lives.” 

‘The Best Tutor’ 

Several days a week, Fordham students visit Hayes and tutor students in an after-school academic support program called Period 9. 

“Although [the Hayes students are]  tired from a full day of classes, they attend Period 9 so they can get that extra help they need in a particular subject,” said Emily Padilla-Bradley, the school’s dean of studies. “Throughout the years, I’ve realized that the students have learned to appreciate, more and more, the help from the tutors from Fordham.” 

One of those tutors is Manuel DeMatos, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior who will be studying adolescent education at the Graduate School of Education next year. 

“Just knowing that you’re having a positive impact and that these kids are improving their potential life—not just in high school, but into the future—is super rewarding,” said DeMatos, who wants to become a high school social studies and French teacher. 

The Cardinal Hayes students in Period 9 are an eclectic bunch. There’s Calvin Lanier, a junior who plays football. There’s Leonel Nepomuceno, a senior who sings in the school choir and loves animals—including his three pets, Hailey the miniature poodle, Joshua the orange tabby cat, and Rango the turtle—so much that he’s considering studying veterinary science in college. Then there’s Albert Alexander Almanzar, a self-described class clown who often played around instead of focusing on his studies. But his years at Hayes—and a Fordham student named Thomas Bradley—changed him, he said. 

Almanzar called Bradley, a student at the Gabelli School of Business, “the best tutor.”

“[He] gives me more motivation to want to do better in my classes because it shows me somebody that cares,” Almanzar said of Bradley, who tutored him in U.S. history and writing. “All day in school, people show that they care. But somebody that’s a little younger, I feel like I could relate to more… that means more to me.”

Finding A Passion for Public Radio 

For the past three years, members of WFUV, Fordham’s public radio station, have paid an annual visit to Cardinal Hayes and, in a conversation with the entire junior class, shared what the students can learn at the station. 

“There is this station that is right within their borough, within the University, that offers the kind of opportunities that they’re not going to find at other colleges and universities across the United States,” said Chuck Singleton, general manager at WFUV, which is ranked among the top 20 college radio stations by the Princeton Review. 

Those visits have led to three paid internships for Hayes students, including Ramon Liriano, a senior who worked in the sports department last summer. Like many of his high school peers, he’s potentially the first in his family to complete a college degree. Thanks to his internship at WFUV, he said, he’s also discovered a potential career in sports broadcasting. 

“I’ve seen my family struggle, especially my mother, who works two jobs [as a housekeeper]. I’ve seen her come home looking tired, especially late at night—sometimes, 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning,” said Liriano. “She’s put me in a Catholic school, pushed me to become better than what she has done in her life … I want to take this opportunity to study something really good in the world that can help provide for my family.”

Giving Students A Voice

Last year, a dozen Hayes honors upperclassmen took a corporate communications course through the Gabelli School of Business. From fall to spring, they learned how to deliver the perfect personal elevator pitch and put together an engaging presentation. They analyzed a Fortune 500 company that experienced a diversity-related crisis, like Starbucks, and presented a new diversity plan to their classmates. But perhaps most importantly, they learned how to become better communicators.

“The difference in how the students presented their work in class, how confident they were in their verbal responses, how confident they became in their social circles, all based on the communication competencies they learned in class … that, to me, was the most rewarding thing,” said Clarence Ball, lecturer and interim director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Gabelli School of Business, who teaches the course at Cardinal Hayes. 

Five students from the initial cohort of Ball’s course are now first-year students at Fordham, including the 2019 Hayes valedictorian, Andy Lin. 

Lin described himself as a shy student, who, as a high school freshman, used to read his speeches word-for-word from a piece of paper. Instead of making direct eye contact during presentations, he would look down. But by the end of Ball’s program, he saw a huge change in himself. 

“Before I went up on stage to give my [valedictorian]  speech, I did the exercises that Professor Ball always had us do,” said Lin, now a first-year Fordham College at Lincoln Center student who plans on studying computer science. “I messed up a few words here and there, but I was able to recompose myself and keep moving on.”

These relationships that Fordham professors and students are fostering in the community are something the University hopes to build on, said Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., vice president for mission integration and planning, who helped found the Center for Community Engaged Learning. Using its Hayes relationship as a model, Fordham is now working on a similar partnership with Aquinas High School, an all-girls Catholic high school in the Belmont section of the Bronx. 

“My hope is that our partnership with Cardinal Hayes is one of many such partnerships with institutions in the Bronx, where students can engage their community more effectively,” said Father McCarthy. “We want to help faculty leaders to connect with community leaders to build up student leaders.” 

Trading Teachers Across the Bronx

Several Hayes teachers have studied at the Graduate School of Education, thanks to the support of a Fordham scholarship that almost halves tuition costs for full-time professionals in faith-based non-public schools, said principal William Lessa.

And in the past three years, three Fordham-based Jesuit scholastics have volunteered at Cardinal Hayes. These young Jesuits who have just finished novitiate are deepening their faith through local community service, said Joseph O’Keefe, S.J., GSAS ’80, a current scholar in residence at the Graduate School of Education and Fordham trustee who was just chosen to lead the new USA East Jesuit province. 

“The idea is to work in the Bronx community and to reflect on that as part of their preparation to become priests,” Father O’Keefe said. 

At Hayes, the scholastics have counseled students dealing with tough situations at home, taught religion classes, and helped seniors navigate the college admission process. 

“They’re there to help. But they also learn from people’s experiences,” said Father O’Keefe. 

An Alumnus from Both Schools 

At the heart of the partnership between the two schools is Donald Almeida, Fordham trustee and retired vice chairman of PwC. 

Almeida, who grew up in Yonkers, New York, is a ’69 Hayes and ’73 Fordham alumnus who now serves on the boards at both schools. Over the past several years, he has spearheaded the partnership between his two alma maters and, with his wife, supported many students—including young men who have experienced homelessness.

Among his mentees is a Hayes student whom Almeida chose not to identify by name. The student plays basketball so well that he will likely receive many Division I offers, said Almeida, who has attended his sports games and cheered him on from the sidelines. He’s also occasionally taken the student and his mother out to dinner. 

“I’m his ‘bro,’” said Almeida. “That’s what he calls me.”

A while back, Almeida learned that the student was considering leaving Hayes and attending a prep school, in hopes of being recruited by better college sports teams. But Almeida said he was more focused on getting the student into the best academic college program. 

Almeida recalled the day he sat in his Rhode Island home, gazing at the ocean, when his cell phone rang. It was the student’s father. For two hours, they debated whether or not the student should stay at Hayes. 

“Thirty seconds after I hung up the phone with his father, [the student]  calls me to tell me he’s staying at Hayes,” said Almeida, noting that the student is not the only one benefitting from their relationship. “The more you impact their lives, the more satisfaction you get.”

For more than a decade, she had worked in the supply chain management industry in the Philippines. Lipa, who had studied electronics and communications engineering in college, helped develop hair products for two global fast-moving consumer goods companies: Unilever and L’Oréal. She was also a devout Catholic since childhood—or so she thought.

In 2013, a colleague confided in Lipa. She told her she had decided to leave the Catholic faith.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [The problem was] my own spirituality … I couldn’t really say anything about it [to her],” Lipa recalled. “I only knew what a grade school student would know about the faith. I wasn’t really growing my faith, in terms of the church’s teachings.”

“And the thing is, I love my faith. I know how beautiful it is. So I started questioning myself: Do I know my faith in a way that I can share it with others?”

That conversation changed Lipa’s life. Since that day, she started to learn more about the Catholic faith—online, in books, in discussions with friends and family. In 2014, Lipa and her mother left the Philippines for a Marian pilgrimage across Europe. In Rome, she scaled the famous Scala Sancta steps—a set of 28 holy steps that Jesus Christ is said to have ascended—with her knees. At the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, she prayed to the woman from whom she takes her second name—Vanessa “Lourdes” Lipa. And at the holy Catholic shrine in Fatima, Portugal, she knelt towards a little chapel and prayed the rosary. 

Lipa said the goal of the pilgrimage was to rediscover Catholicism, deepen her emotions, and appreciate the beauty of her faith. It worked.  

A year later, Lipa resigned from her full-time job at L’Oréal. Instead, she devoted her days to doing research on spirituality, religious struggles, and mental health.

In 2017, she started to pursue a Ph.D. in applied theology at De La Salle University in the Philippines. Then a year into the Ph.D. program, she discovered an opportunity she said she couldn’t pass up—Fordham’s master’s program in Christian spirituality, a program abroad that would complement her studies in the Philippines

Last August, Lipa became the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s first on-campus student from the Philippines, made possible by a recent partnership with De La Salle University. She now lives in Jersey City with her husband via an F1 visa.

In just a semester-and-a-half at Fordham, Lipa has taken in-person and online classes on the Old Testament, spiritual direction, church and society, and theology of the human person. One of her favorite activities is reading the work of other biblical scholars and comparing it with the modern take on the Bible.

“It was a very different world when people wrote them [the Bible verses],” said Lipa, who will graduate from GRE in 2021. “We’re also reading them from a different context, and so you kind of have to really make sure—is this what they meant during that time? And learn from it as well, coming from where we are right now.”

She’s also met many non-Catholic classmates—a contrast from her life in the Philippines, a country that boasts one of the largest Catholic populations in the world.

“The Philippines is almost homogenous in terms of Christianity and Catholicism. In the U.S., there’s a lot of other denominations within the Christian tradition,” Lipa said. “I see that through my classes. I have classmates who are not Catholic. We get to share that in class, and share our experiences.”

After she graduates from Fordham and returns to De La Salle to finish her Ph.D. degree, she doesn’t know what’s next. Perhaps she’ll be a pastoral counselor in the Philippines, she said, or find a career that blends all her strengths—academics, religion, counseling, math, and analytics. One day, she wants to share the fruits of her Fordham education with her fellow Filipinos, the way the GRE dean, Faustino M. Cruz, S.M., a Filipino native, did.

For now, there’s one thing she doesn’t regret—the epiphany that hit her in 2013.

“It’s drawing me closer to God,” Lipa said.

This January, he will become a visiting scholar at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he will collaborate on a project that combats similar hate speech.

Only this time, Anderson is dealing with religious nationalists: those who use religion as an excuse to advance their own non-religious purposes—often involving hateful actions and language—in their native countries.

He calls Poland, a country where the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, a severe example. Many Catholic Poles claim that because immigrants and refugees are neither Catholic nor Polish, they can’t be true members of their country, he explained. Anderson argues that not only is their rhetoric is inherently wrong, these false statements also undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church and, he added, negate the church’s overall goal: commitment to the common good of humanity worldwide.

“The declaration of human rights, the United Nations—Catholic churches adopted that, which means that all of this nationalist kind of language is contrary to what the church believes,” he said. “Catholics are not called to identify themselves with any particular nation or with any particular culture. Catholics are supposed to see themselves as belonging to a heavenly kingdom.”

As a young boy, Anderson lived in a Catholic household that embodied those beliefs. His father was a news cameraman who covered the career of Martin Luther King Jr., the deadly 1958 bombing of a black Birmingham church, and civil rights activities; his mother was a progressive Catholic and social worker who worked with “the poorest of the poor,” he said.

“The environment I grew up in was one where Catholics were really encouraged to see African Americans as our brothers and sisters,” he said, “and really push back on the language of exclusivism and denial of people’s rights.”

By finding ways that Fordham can collaborate with NYU, Anderson hopes to develop educational programs for religious leaders that explain why religion and nationalism are unrelated. He says it’s important to train leaders—pastors, bishops, religion teachers—on how to train people to respond to religious nationalism. He added that it’s also critical to show religious leaders how to illustrate the flaws with religious nationalism, and explain to everyday people how it cannot be legitimately claimed as a religious movement. Anderson, who is exploring various foundations and other granting agencies that would fund these programs, aims to apply for three or four grants. He says securing a grant related to Catholic nationalism is especially critical.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian church—home to more than one billion members. Catholic nationalism is popping up in multiple places across Europe, including Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, France, and Austria, he added.

“There are priests and bishops in Poland and elsewhere who are presenting Catholic nationalism as a real option, and they’re not being disciplined at all. They’re being allowed to act more or less as independent operators,” he said. “I’m hoping to motivate the bishops to see that this is a real significant problem. It’s going to undermine how people see the credibility of the church, even more than we’re dealing with already.”

This is the second project he has conducted with NYU. In the first partnership, Anderson developed educational programs for seminarians that provided strategies they could use to promote civil discourse in politics. 

“If we can teach people, hopefully in the Catholic schools and in other institutions on the ground, then when they get older and they’re approached by these religious nationalists,” he said, “they will see the problems with it. Or at least they’ll be prepared to respond.”

“Through personal contact, or travel, or even stories, we are all expanding. We are caring as a people, and we are so blessed here in the United States. We can make life better for our southern neighbors,” Sister Kelleher said on December 2, when she received the Mother Butler Leadership Award at the Marymount College Alumnae Association’s annual Founder’s Day celebration on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

Sister Kelleher, a Catholic nun and an attorney, has been on the front lines of immigration issues and asylum requests for more than 30 years. She speaks passionately of her clients at Legal Aid Services of Collier County in Immokalee, Florida, a heavily agricultural area just north of the Everglades. There she mostly supports impoverished migrant farmworkers who were victims of crimes in their home countries in Central and South America.

In one case earlier this year, she advocated for a woman who had fled an abusive relationship with a gang member who was threatening her life. She said he had left him in Honduras and returned to her family in El Salvador, but he pursued her and continued physically and emotionally abusing her. She was unable to leave the relationship without risking her life, she said, so she sought asylum in the U.S. With Sister Kelleher’s help, she was able to stay.

“I could not have won that case later in 2018,” Sister Kelleher told her fellow Marymount alumnae and guests at the luncheon in Butler Commons. “Such victims of domestic violence no longer qualify” to be protected, she said, citing a recent memo issued by then Attorney General Jeff Sessions (a policy which was struck down about two weeks after the event). Many women who are victims of violence and sexual assault will most likely be sent back to countries where their safety is at risk, she said.

“The [long-term] solution to this issue and so many others lies in nations with capacity collaborating with honest stakeholders in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador to invest so as to make change in these countries,” she said.

In response to an audience member who asked how they could help, Sister Kelleher encouraged attendees to take “hold of the power that women have.”

“Use your pen, use your voice, and, frankly, get in touch with organizations that you feel at home with” she told them.

After receiving the award, Sister Kelleher, who was one of only three nuns worldwide to serve as an auditor at the Catholic Church’s 2015 Synod of Bishops on the Family, spoke about how meaningful it was to be honored by her fellow Marymount alumnae—especially since both her mother and aunt had attended the college before her. “We’re very much a Marymount family,” said the 1960 grad, who also earned a master’s degree in English from Fordham in 1969.

It was while teaching high school religion and reading about various social movements that Sister Kelleher was first inspired to act on behalf of vulnerable populations, she said. And when she saw how integral the legal system was to advancing causes in ministry, she decided to attend law school at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Her motivation is simple. “I can only say that, when my neighbor’s house is on fire, I can hardly say it’s no concern of mine,” she said.

On a rainy Wednesday night this month, Moore, an associate professor of theology at Fordham, spoke about her friends to a few dozen recent Fordham graduates who filled the brick-walled backroom of a Midtown Manhattan pub for the Young Alumni Committee’s annual Faith on Tap event.

Moore called her lecture “Spiritual Resistance: Lessons from the 1940s,” and she used her years of research and writing on Catholic French Resistance figures to inspire attendees feeling appalled by the politics of today and hoping to be a force for good in the world.

While philosophers Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil and Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac aren’t widely read and discussed outside theology and philosophy classrooms these days, Moore said the three have a lot to offer modern Americans. “They sort of saw these storm clouds gathering [in Europe] with the ascendency of anti-Semitism, xenophobia in the 1930s, and were clearly able to name everything that was happening,” she said.

In today’s political moment, with its increase in public demonstrations of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, Moore said that her research subjects became more real.

“They were like these dreamlike people, occupying my imagination, warning me of a sort of dreamlike, nightmare future,” she said. Now, they “seem much more kind of human and down to earth. … They really are men and women that can simply offer their direct instruction for us today.”

The ‘Nourishing Food of Greater Unity’

Even in years of great violence and political division, thinkers like de Lubac, Weil, and Maritain practiced a nonviolent “spiritual” resistance, Moore said. They organized, they protested, and they wrote—very carefully.

“They were extremely vigilant about language. They were always on the lookout for how easily language could be distorted in ways that would misinform, seduce, and weaken people’s ability to think critically and clearly,” Moore said. “They knew that language changes not only what we say and write, but how we feel, or how we interpret reality.”

Moore referenced Marie-Madeleine Davy, a French Catholic philosopher who would always classify other, marginalized groups as part of the same human race—“Some of us are Jews. … Some of us are Muslims,” she’d note, Moore said.

Henri de Lubac, who became a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1983, called this use of the first-person plural “a way to distribute spiritual food.” Or, in Moore’s words, “the nourishing food of greater unity,” as opposed to “the junk food of language that divides us.”

But the French Resistance figures Moore discussed weren’t solely focused on other faiths. They felt a connection to Catholics around the world, despite racial or national boundaries. After all, “catholic means universal,” Moore said, and she told Fordham alumni they can apply that lesson, especially if they’re interested in volunteering or joining an advocacy group.

“I feel like sometimes it can be embarrassing—what are you going to do, just call a nonprofit and ask to volunteer?” Moore said. But she said that going to a Jesuit school and taking theology classes—even for those who aren’t Catholic or even religious—can provide a common ground and a common language for getting involved with a faith-based organization. “It gives you a little foot in the door,” she said.

‘No One Acts Alone’

Moore also noticed that her subjects wrote about friendship as much as they did spirituality.

“It was a more interpersonal, warmer way of engaging the political world,” she said. “We tend to think of the [French] Resistance or any of the heroes in history as kind of courageously facing the immensity of anti-Semitism or racism, facing the immensity alone. But that’s not true. They did all this work in the context of intimate friendships, even families. … No one acts alone.”

Moore closed the lecture by giving attendees a high grade.

“The other thing that [the French Resistance figures] did was have a civil society,” Moore said. “Even just coming out on a rainy night to talk about ideas—this is really important stuff.”

—Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15

Watch Brenna Moore’s spring 2016 “Fordham Mini Lecture” on mysticism and spirituality in religion and politics.

It was no wonder, then, that those same kids devoured popular comic books—even religious ones—the first chance they got.

Last month, a former faculty member donated two-dozen rare copies of old Catholic comic books to the library’s archives. The books were from the series Treasure Chest and Topics, and had been distributed and widely read in Catholic schools from the 1950s to the late 1960s.

Donor Bert Hansen, Ph.D., said he bought the comics to research how medical heroes were depicted in American comics and other popular culture mass media.

Popular culture and medicine

“Public libraries don’t collect comic books, so they don’t get saved,” said Hansen, author of Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media images and Popular Attitudes in America (Rutgers, 2009). “Since I was looking for popular images related to medicine and doctoring, the comic book was where it was at—that, and Hollywood movies.”

Hansen, who taught in the Department of Natural Sciences at the Lincoln Center campus in the 1970s, said he limited his purchase of hundreds of comics to those that featured medical stories. The Catholic comics often featured American heroes with medical accomplishments, such as Walter Reed, Jonas Salk, and Albert Sabin, as well as plenty of “medically relevant saints.”

“What made the Catholic books different is that they included a saint in almost every issue,” said Hansen, a professor emeritus of history at Baruch College. “There was the Mother Cabrini story; there was Marguerite d’Youville, (who ran the General Hospital of Montreal) who was recently canonized. And there’s a story about Father Lazzaro Spallanzani, an 18^th-century biologist and physiologist.”

Touchy topics

LoSchiavo said she was an “avid reader” of the comics as a child growing up on Long Island. She welcomed the collection for an additional reason: “Besides Treasure Chest’s puzzles, games, lives of the saints, and devotional prayers, it also attempted to deal with issues like juvenile delinquency and social unrest at a time when these topics weren’t easily discussed in Catholic grammar school,” she said.

For now, Hansen is glad the fragile bits of memorabilia are safely stored in a temperature-controlled environment. But he also hopes their presence will inspire more donations of Catholic popular culture.

“As a historian, I hope we might find alumni who have some of these comics in their attic and didn’t know the library would like them,” he said. “What people might perceive as some funny old things are actually of interest to librarians, archivists, and scholars.”

The deaths of Maura Clarke, M.M., Ita Ford, M.M., Dorothy Kazel, O.S.U., and Jean Donovan spurred outrage against the U.S. government’s support of the right-wing Salvadoran dictatorship and its campaign of terror against anyone who resisted it.

Five years ago, at the prompting of Clarke’s family, investigative reporter Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, sought to recover the details of the Sister’s life from the shadow of her horrific death, in a book titled A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books, 2016).

On March 7 at the Lincoln Center campus, in honor of International Women’s Day, Markey gave a talk titled “Foremothers Against Tyranny: The Radical Faith of Maura Clarke,” in which she brought Clarke to life as a deeply courageous woman devoted to human rights.

A Way Into the World

According to Markey, for Clarke and many other girls in her insular working-class neighborhood in Rockaway, Queens, joining a religious order was a way into the world—not out of it.

“These girls weren’t running away from anything. Given their class and the gender constraints that they faced, going into the convent was a way to a bigger life,” she said.

After the young woman became a Maryknoll Sister, she spent most of her adult life working with the poor in Nicaragua, and later in El Salvador.

Markey said that ideas raised by the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s played an important role in Clarke’s deepening commitment to social justice. Special among those ideas were the universal call to holiness, and the emphasis on the church as not just an institution, but of the people themselves.

“By the middle of the sixties, Maura understood the phrase ‘the body of Christ’ to be a description of the people gathered in the pews as much as the wafer in the tabernacle,” said Markey.

A Faith in Which Everybody Matters

According to Markey, Clarke began to live out these ideas in Latin America by working with poor people, especially women, in small groups in their homes—analyzing Bible stories, asking questions about God in their life, and listening to what they had to say.

“I think that’s the radical faith—this idea that everybody matters . . . that nobody is a number, that nobody is a product, that nobody is for sale,” said Markey.

In researching her book, Markey met a number of people whose lives had been touched by Clarke, whose tireless endeavors serving others also included working in schools and health clinics, demonstrating for land reforms, assisting victims of government violence, and documenting human rights abuses.

For Markey, remembering Clarke helps us do more than just understand the conflicts of Latin America in the 1970s.

“There’s something transformational for ourselves when we study a good person, when we understand how her life made sense,” she said.

Markey’s talk was sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Peace and Justice Studies.

–Nina Heidig

It was an important reminder during dark, perilous times. Hartmann participated in the D-Day landing at Normandy and several other brutal battles with the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. His Fordham heritage, he wrote, had become “an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war.”

Hartmann’s son, Alfred Hartmann Jr., M.D., FCRH ’63, discovered the letter among his father’s things after his death in 2000 at age 89. “It says a lot about his relationship with Fordham, and Fordham’s relationship with the world,” he said.

Hartmann may never have had the chance to send his letter, but FORDHAM magazine is proud to share his enduring message of faith and gratitude with our readers.

The full text and an image of the letter appear below.

Men of Fordham on the Campus,

Your “Catholic Prayer Book for the Army and Navy,” via a circuitous mail route, reached me here. I want to thank you for a most thoughtful and useful remembrance. It gives a man a lift to realize that he is not forgotten, and the prayer book, by virtue of its pocketing ease, is a real adjunct to the service man.

When still on the beaches I used to ponder over such seemingly unnecessary incongruities as “good is derived from evil.” It is unfortunate that it takes a world holocaust to revive the merits of such institutions as Peace, the Home, Loyalty, Friendship and the like. It is too bad that man’s more shallow criteria of success are adequately exposed only by a global upheaval.

That “man does not live by bread alone,” furthermore, is proven conclusively only by the advent of chaos and sudden death. It takes more than finite equipment to weather the exigencies of total war. Without the sanctuary of our Faith, the multiple heartaches of the present added to the unknown and ominous forebodings of the future could drive men to the point of despair.

Fordham has always taught, teaches, and will continue to teach the true worth of human institutions, and the Faith without which mankind gropes in exterior darkness. What is more, Fordham propounds these principles even in the absence of … catastrophe. She affords to her matriculants the ability to evaluate the world about us, and to derive benefit from good times and evil times alike.

I am proud of my Fordham heritage. It is a heritage that becomes an infallible yardstick in peace and a mighty bulwark in war. It is the intangible something-extra which always pays dividends in the heart. You too will come to the realization of this appreciation, as even now “with prayerful remembrance from the Fordham Men on the campus” indicates.

Sincerely,

Alfred A. Hartmann ’32

At this moment when our undocumented students are most vulnerable and afraid, I am writing to you to inform you that I have signed three documents that I hope make it clear that Fordham sees and embraces undocumented students as valued and loved members of our community, that Fordham stands with them, and that we will do all we can to be effective advocates for them. Since my signature signals not only my endorsement, but the endorsement of the entire University community of the sentiments contained in them, I assure you that I did not sign them lightly. Rather, I did so only after a great deal of research and prayer.

Because he was himself an immigrant and the victim of prejudice and discrimination both in Ireland and in the United States, and because he was the bishop of a largely immigrant community that suffered from the same discrimination from which he had suffered, Archbishop Hughes was passionately devoted to America’s immigrants. Therefore, when he founded Saint John’s College (Fordham University) in 1841, he did so to create a school that would make it possible for the immigrants whom he served to receive an education that would both confound their enemies and enable them to take their rightful place in American society.

For its entire 175-year history, Fordham has kept faith with its founder’s vision and committed itself in a special way to serving immigrants and their sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters. To be sure, the ethnic identities of the students whom Fordham has served have changed in the course of time. Through the decades, however, the University has never deviated from its historic mission of welcoming and serving new Americans, a mission that has shaped and defined us, and a mission that has enriched us beyond measure. I would be less than honest if I didn’t tell you that as the grandson of four Irish immigrants and the son of a first-generation college graduate whose life was transformed by the education that he received here at Fordham, the University’s devotion to and service of generations of new Americans is especially close to my heart.

Of course, Archbishop Hughes’s legacy is not the only reason that the University has always been drawn to the service of new Americans. Far from it. Our Catholic roots remind us of the Gospel mandate to serve those at the peripheries, and to ‎treat them as cherished sisters and brothers. Our Jesuit identity places upon us the sacred responsibility to treat every student in our care with cura personalis, that is to say, we are called and challenged to treat every Fordham student with reverence, respect and affirming love.

In light of the powerful forces that have shaped us, we can never turn away from those members of our community who are most vulnerable. To do so would be a betrayal of both the ideals that we hold most dear and the sacred mission to which we have devoted ourselves for the past 175 years. We simply cannot do that. We will not do that.

Below is the complete text of the statement written by the presidents of the member schools of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), and links to the 2013 AJCU statement, the Pomona Statement, and the statement of the member schools of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities.

As I close, let me ask you to pray for all of our students, and especially our undocumented students. I assure you that you all remain in my prayers.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.
President

Statement of AJCU Presidents – November 2016

As Presidents of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities we feel spiritually and morally compelled to raise a collective voice confirming our values and commitments as Americans and educators. We represent colleges and universities from across our nation with more than 215,000 students and more than 21,000 faculty, and more than 2 million living alumni.

Grounded in our Catholic and Jesuit mission, we are guided by our commitment to uphold the dignity of every person, to work for the common good of our nation, and to promote a living faith that works for justice. We see our work of teaching, scholarship and the formation of young minds and spirits as a sacred trust.

That trust prompts us to labor for solidarity among all people, and especially with and for the poor and marginalized of our society. That trust calls us to embrace the entire human family, regardless of their immigration status—or religious allegiance. And experience has shown us that our communities are immeasurably enriched by the presence, intelligence, and committed contributions of undocumented students, as well as of faculty and staff of every color and from every faith tradition.

Therefore, we will continue working:

• To protect to the fullest extent of the law undocumented students on our campuses;
• To promote retention of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program (DACA);
• To support and stand with our students, faculty and staff regardless of their faith traditions;
• To preserve the religious freedoms on which our nation was founded.

As we conclude this Year of Mercy, we make our own the aims enunciated by Pope Francis: “Every human being is a child of God! He or she bears the image of Christ! We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved.”

We hope that this statement will inspire members of our University communities, as well as the larger national community, to promote efforts at welcome, dialogue, and reconciliation among all that share our land. We welcome further conversation and commit ourselves to modeling the kind of discourse and debate that are at the heart of our nation’s ideals. And we promise to bring the best resources of our institutions – of intellect, reflection, and service–to bear in the task of fostering understanding in the United States at this particular time in our history.

AJCU 2013 Statement

Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities Statement

Pomona Statement

A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura

In this deeply researched biography, based on government documents (many still heavily redacted), personal correspondence, and interviews with family members and others, Eileen Markey tells the story of Sister Maura Clarke, a Catholic nun who lived and died at “the intersection of religious conviction and political action.”

On December 2, 1980, members of the El Salvador National Guard killed Clarke and three other American churchwomen who had been providing food, aid, and medicine to local peasants, and had been suspected by the government of being subversives. The murders occurred near the start of a 12-year civil war that would leave more than 75,000 people dead and spark years of debate about U.S. policy in El Salvador and throughout Latin America. (The U.S. government ultimately provided $7 billion in aid to El Salvador during the war, supporting the military dictatorship’s effort to prevent left-wing guerrillas from coming to power in the country.)

Markey chronicles Clarke’s life with compassion, from her roots in New York City as a daughter of Irish immigrants to “a hastily dug grave at the edge of the cold war.” It’s the story of a woman who “threw in her lot with disregarded people, and in doing so grew bold.”